Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science!
Truly women and girls have made tremendous advances in the sciences, however the UN reports that women still only make up less than 30 percent of researchers worldwide. This means we must do more work to ensure that this type of work is welcoming to women, and doesn’t push them out. While many initiatives focus on growing the pipeline for women and girls in science by providing new opportunities to involve girls in science and STEM, and while this is certainly a laudable goal, there a fewer initiatives that address the stresses women face as women who enter traditionally male-dominated fields. This is what I’d like to address here.
My recent work with colleagues at Royal Roads University (see papers here, and here) examined one uglier aspect of being a woman in a research field. We looked at the experiences of women researchers who used digital communication tools like social media to communicate their research to the public, and we found that not only was online harassment a common experience for these researchers, but that experiencing online harassment had ripple effects that impacted researchers’ ability to work, their mental health, and their desire to share their research with the public.
Put simply, women scientists who choose to share their research online often open themselves up to harassment. This harassment can lead to anxiety and depression, and can impact a researcher’s productivity at work. It also acts as a mental barrier which discourages the sharing of research in the future. Sometimes it can make women feel like they don’t belong in science at all.
And supports are not yet formally in place to help with this problem. Often law enforcement doesn’t provide help because social media harassment is not considered “real” harassment. Often university departments are unable or unwilling to provide support. Often researchers do not have adequate mental health coverage (especially if they are contract researchers) to help them access counseling services to deal with the psychological impacts of bullying. And the social media platforms themselves often do nothing.
If you have ensured that girls have adequate access and support to choose science as an aspiration. If you ensure that girls and young women have the opportunity and mentorship needed to pursue science as a career. If you nurture women and girl scientists throughout the pipeline, and then they are harassed or bullied when they finally become researchers, then we all still have a long way to go to fix this problem. In our research, the main reason women reported experiencing harassment was because they were women. This is someting that nobody should consider acceptable.
The online harassment of female and female-identified researchers is tragic for so many reasons. It silences the voices of women and girls in science, it limits their productivity. It deprives the public of the fruits of their labor and it may even push them out of science. For the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I’d like to suggest that we find new ways to support our research colleagues online. I’d like to suggest that we advocate for policy changes at the institutional level, and practice changes and the platform level, and I’d like to suggest that we all make an extra effort to vocally support our female and female identified research colleagues. This is as important as growing the pipeline.